Monthly Report July/August

First of all, let me appologize for the delay regarding this blogpost. I just did not find time to write something during the last weeks, so I once again “combined” two months into one post.

One of the reasons was that I was visiting the gamescom in cologne, to show Bloo Kid 2 at the pocketgamer “big indie pitch”. Therefore, I was working on a “presentable” version of the game. To the right is a picture of me explaining the game to the folks of making games, a german magazine covering game development related stuff. It may look like I am asleep, but in fact I was wide awake at that moment 🙂

It was a great event and people were quite interested in the game. It was a great motivation-boost for me, and I will continue designing levels for the game once I finish this post. Check this link for some aftermath of the event.

Riding a dead horse

Bloo Kid has become some sort of “guinea-pig” for me when it comes to trying out experimental stuff like new ad-networks, social services etc. And since Corona SDK is supporting google play game services now, I decided that it is once again time for a new experiment. The game has been out in the wild for over two years now, so in mobile-game terms, it is really “ancient”. One might wonder if it makes sense to update such an old game. I say: it depends. In the case of Bloo Kid, it totally makes sense.

I have talked about how I built up a strong “daily-user” base in Bloo Kid in my past blog-posts (espacially in THIS one), so I wont repeat that again. Just take it for granted that the game has 5k-15k daily active users. And in this case, it really can make a difference what advertising network you choose!

I released a Bloo Kid update lately that features the mentioned google play game service which for me is the long-awaited alternative to the now shut-down OpenFeint. I also added a new ad-provider called vungle. Vungle displays 15 seconds-long video ads.

I myself just hate the types of video ads that can not be cancelled but must be watched instead (like you know it from youtube). So I was glad to see that you can either force users to watch the full 15 seconds video or allow them to skip the video after three seconds. I decided to give it a go with the 3-seconds configuration. Of course you will get more revenue for “completed” videos, but since I hate long ads personally, I did not want them to appear in my game.

I released the update for Android only at the moment. The Android version of Bloo Kid makes way less revenue than the iOS version, and I did not want to risk the current income stream of the iOS version. So the Android version is some sort of test run.

Following now is a step-by-step comparison between the RevMob and the Vungle revenue

So first of all, have a look at the abysmal RevMob revenue for Bloo Kid Android:

On Android, Bloo Kid does not manage to generate more than $15 a month

With a bit of luck, I manage to make $15 a month with the Android version of the game. It’s no pain if my experiment would fail and I don’t earn that 15 quids anymore. Luckily, it turned out the other way round. Check the Vungle impressions and revenue below:

That’s about 700 daily video views on Vungle. Notice that I have about 1,5k to 3k daily views with RevMob.

Now the interesting part: the revenue:

You can see $2 to $7 daily revenue with Vungle. In comparison, RevMob makes less than $1 every day. With a multiple of views!

I think it would be a mistake to assume that four times the views on Vungle means four times the revenue. But to see that I make more money (on Android) with less views is still promising. The next logical thing I did was releasing an iOS version of Bloo Kid, also featuring Vungle. That version is still waiting for review, so you will read about the outcome in my next blogpost. Since eCPM is generally higher on iOS than on Android, I am quite excited about what will happen once the iOS version is online.

The update did not only feature another ad network but also new leaderboards for best-times, adding a “speed-run-contest”-like component to the whole game. I hope to tie players even more to the game than before by giving them the opportunity to compete online. The already existent leaderboard only counts the collected stars. There is a maximum of 252 stars, so there are currently a LOT of players that are all having “the best possible score”. But now, with the “best-times” leaderboards, it is once again a “real” competition.

[teaser] I have currently another project going on that fits into the “dead horse” theme, but it is too early to tell by now [/teaser] 🙂

So that’s basically all that happened during the past weeks (and is worth mentioning). Hope you like the info, and as always: feel free to ask questions in the comments section!

Hey Jorg, nice stuff over there. I was very questionable about android income and your post is making me confused much more then ever.
So.. if your google store revenues where about 40% of 4.5k$ medium per month, how is it possible that introducing vungle, your revmob income is decreasing so drastically ?
May be you’re COMPLETELY (or almost) replacing revmob ads with vungle and you’re planning to rise its income progressively to get to the 40% target like last months ?
Hope you’ll clear my doubts and thanks in advance,
JP

first thing to mention is that you must distinguish between the numbers from distimo monitor and the revmob income.

Distimo does NOT show my revmob income, only Android Sales, iOS Sales AND iOS iAd revenue. That is why I tend to show separate numbers for my revmob revenue.

Second is that my RevMob revenue comes nearly completely from iOS. So now after I switched the ads to vungle, there are nearly no more RevMob ads shown, thus making the RevMob revenue sink that drastically.

I am going to wite the new blog post right now, and that will hopefully make things even clearer for you.